Hope, Resilience, and Brave Conversations: Diversity Dialogue Day 2025

Dr. Mykee Fowlin opened the 2025 Diversity Dialogue Day Upper School assembly with an experiment. Standing on the stage of the Barbara & David Loeb Performing Arts Center, he held his phone close to the microphone and said, “I’m going to play a sound. When you hear it, raise your hand.”

A few moments later, most of the students’ hands shot up, while the majority of adults in the room shared confused looks. Dr. Fowlin explained that the sound is a frequency most people over the age of 30 can no longer hear.

“I want you to remember that even though the adults here have degrees and expertise, you have access to knowledge and experiences that they no longer do, and you can become their teachers,” he told the students.

Dr. Fowlin is a psychologist and a performer who brings identity-focused workshops to schools and organizations across the country. At GFS, he presented his one man show You Don’t Know Me Until You Know Me to both the Middle and Upper School. 

His spirited performance blended memoir, character work, and deep question-asking. The workshop which he describes as, “an invitation to transform pain into reflection, healing, and action” presented a call to the audience to “shed our masks … together, we can cultivate a world that is more inclusive, compassionate, and connected.”

GFS Diversity Dialogue Day has been a comprehensive day-long program since 2020. It’s a moment for students and faculty to break from regular classes to engage in conversations around social justice issues; take more decisive action to lift the GFS community experience by minding the Light of each individual to support community flourishing; and help develop the skills necessary for participating in meaningful and impactful dialogue with empathy and care.

This year’s Diversity Dialogue Day, held on November 6, was titled Everything Everywhere All At Once: Practices for Resilience and Hope in Complicated Times. Students were asked to consider social justice issues that inform their experiences and, through dialogue, attempt to make sense of the complex topics and non-stop headlines they encounter every day.

The DEI staff chose the topic in the hopes that it would help give students a “resiliency toolkit.”

“We want them to think about how each of us can fuel our resiliency and disrupt oppressive systems by embracing and owning the positive aspects of our identities,” said Charla Okewole, Director of DEI at GFS. “It’s about developing a sense of, ‘I have strength because of these parts of my identity.’”
 
“Hope is active, not just passive—it’s something you can do and project,” added Eric Aurelien, DEI Faculty and Staff Coordinator. “We want students to understand that they have autonomy and can make real changes in the world.”

Dr. Fowlin’s assembly was just one component of a busy Diversity Dialogue Day schedule for Upper School students. 

The day began with Seminal Readings, organized by Okewole, Rob Goldberg, Head of the History Department, and Adam Hotek, Upper School English faculty. It included an excerpt from philosopher Byung-Chal Han's The Spirit of Hope, which investigates the modern-day climate of fear that keeps humans estranged from one another, and how this can be used to dominate, silence, and oppress. The excerpt was followed by short quotations from six 19th- and 20th-century thinkers, and queries for written reflections and discussions about different aspects of fear, hope, and identity.

After Meeting for Worship and lunch, students spread across campus to attend Diversity Dialogue Day workshops. These sessions covered a variety of topics, including Music Culture and The Sound of Philadelphia, Whose Land? Land Acknowledgements and Beyond, The Biology Of Race, and Moving Toward Anti-Classism.

Many of the workshops were designed and led by students, working in collaboration with Aurelien and DEI Administrative Coordinator Jalil Pines ’15. Students submitted workshop pitches earlier in October, and Aurelien, Pines, and other faculty helped them hone their concepts to spark thoughtful, candid conversation.  

“Dialogue is in the name of this program on purpose because we want to challenge the students to step outside the box,” said Pines. “We hope they come out of this day reinvigorated and ready to push forward.”

One of the workshops, International Current Affairs, was facilitated by two of GFS’ Diversity Ambassadors, Avni Gupta ’27 and Reina Yagawara ’26. The idea was to de-center U.S.-based headlines and encourage their fellow students to delve deeper into global news stories.

“Part of Diversity Dialogue Day is having difficult conversations, but we felt like a lot of the time, difficult conversations are only focused on U.S. politics,” said Gupta. “Being an informed citizen is not just about knowing things that are happening inside the U.S.”

During their workshop in the Alumni building, Gupta and Yagawara had the participants break into small groups to research different global regions, then make a few slides to present back about an issue or story taking place there. They provided a few guiding questions, like “What makes this event significant?” and “How are citizens responding to this event?”

The small groups zoomed in on different corners of the world, including Afghanistan, Italy, China, Nigeria, and Indonesia, and then shared their findings and fielded questions from other students. Gupta said she was pleased with how the workshop went, especially how interested everyone was in their own research and others’ findings. 

“Everyone was focused and ready to work and listen,” she said. “I hope today helped everyone remember that American news is not the only news out there—every country has something happening, and it's important to acknowledge that.”

Next door in Hargroves, computer science faculty Jillian Ma and Director of IT and Head of Computer Science and Digital Media John Henderson were joined by Classics Department Head Julie Marren in leading Misinformation, Bias, and AI. 

They began their presentation by illustrating different types of bias, like cognitive, systemic, institutional, and data-driven. Students were asked to cite examples of each type and share ways they’ve seen bias manifest in the media. The teachers also walked them through the basics of how AI models learn, and how bias can enter into that process.

“Bias matters because it can shape perceptions of who we are, how we interact with society, and our decision-making,” said Henderson. 

In small groups, students worked on identifying pieces of misinformation and disinformation and played a visual version of the playground game Telephone to learn how mis- and disinformation spread. The session ended with a discussion of students’ role in bias and AI, ethical considerations of what their responsibility is, and how critical thinking skills can help shield against the bias that exists in both humans and machines.

When asked what he hoped students gleaned from the workshop, Henderson replied: “I hope students gained some basic terminology, met someone they didn’t previously know, and walked away with a better understanding of how they think of themselves as humans and learners in this digital age.”

Some Diversity Dialogue Day workshops centered physical resilience-building practices that incorporated the Quaker principles of simplicity and doing less with more. In the Fitness Center in Main Building, Morgan Wambold and Cece Holeschak, two of GFS’ athletic trainers, led students in a mat pilates class, taking them through foundational exercises and core activations. Strength can be built through simple, mindful movements, they explained.  

In a science classroom in Wade, Sistahs, an affinity group for female students of color from various backgrounds, led a Joy Through Self-Care workshop, focused on the importance of rest during resistance. Stations were set up throughout the room where students could do puzzles, paint their nails, apply face masks, craft with beads, and color with crayons and markers. Affirmations taped to the walls, relaxing music, and an aromatherapy diffuser added to the relaxing atmosphere. 

Ayomide Enakhimion ’26, one of the workshop organizers, noted that she and the other Sistahs members wanted to create an interactive environment where people could decompress and feel good, even if they were experiencing stress.

“Today we learned a lot about hope: how hope is different from optimism and how it can help us see a future even when things are really hard,” she said. “We felt like we could contribute to that hope by providing self-care.” 

Each facet of the 2025 Diversity Dialogue Day were “bricks in the wall” Okewole noted, fit together to prompt students to dig deep into their identities and social issues in a way that’s empowering and encouraging. 

“Today was about what we can do with our differences, raising our consciousness, and tackling intellectual ideas around oppression,” she said. “By addressing the personal, the systemic, and how to make hope actionable, we painted a wider picture of understanding and urged them to think about multiple perspectives.”